People Are “Rawdogging” Flights Now, And We Need To Know How You Feel About This Trend

He said he’d never done such a thing before, or even thought to do it, but his less-than-ideal seating situation inspired him to try it out. 

“I’m a bigger guy, I got to my seat and the man in the middle was twice my size,” he said. “I know the middle seat is the worst, you’ve got no comfort, so I just gave him the armrest and sort of sat there with my arms folded into myself trying not to get hit by the cart. I’m kind of miserable, and I go, ‘You know what, at this point, I’m just going to commit and raw dog it. No headphones, no sleeping.’”

Firestine, who went so far as to decline any refreshments from the flight attendants (“I don’t recommend the no water thing, especially on longer flights,” he said), did not leave the experience feeling like a new traveler.

“I would like to say I came out of this with some kind of lesson, some kind of epiphany or emotional growth,” he said. “I got nothing. Nothing out of this at all. The two-and-a-half-hour flight felt like a four-hour flight.” 

He did, however, (half) joke that sitting in utter silence serves as a sort of atonement that any traveler could stand to partake in.

How does he feel about the name of the trend? “I think it’s hilarious,” he said.

That’s the sentiment going around social media, where people hopped on both the concept itself and the discourse concerning it.

One person suggested that this might be a guy thing in particular: “I could be wrong on this, but I believe the University of Pennsylvania did a study on this that found that men’s brains more frequently enter a ‘rest state’ than women’s do, basically confirming that men can in fact think about nothing for prolonged periods of time.” (The author of the study this person was apparently referring to denied that this was actually the finding of their research.)